d nature there was circle within circle, and depth beneath
depth, it was to be believed that Mary Garland, though she did not amuse
herself with dropping stones into her soul, and waiting to hear them
fall, laid quite as many sources of spiritual life under contribution.
She had believed Roderick was a fine fellow when she bade him farewell
beneath the Northampton elms, and this belief, to her young, strenuous,
concentrated imagination, had meant many things. If it was to grow cold,
it would be because disenchantment had become total and won the battle
at each successive point.

Miss Garland had even in her face and carriage something of the
preoccupied and wearied look of a person who is watching at a sick-bed;
Roderick's broken fortunes, his dead ambitions, were a cruel burden to
the heart of a girl who had believed that he possessed "genius," and
supposed that genius was to one's spiritual economy what full pockets
were to one's domestic. And yet, with her, Rowland never felt, as
with Mrs. Hudson, that undercurrent of reproach and bitterness toward
himself, that impertinent implication that he had defrauded her of
happiness. Was this justice, in Miss Garland, or was it mercy? The
answer would have been difficult, for she had almost let Rowland feel
before leaving Rome that she liked him well enough to forgive him an
injury. It was partly, Rowland fancied, that there were occasional
lapses, deep and sweet, in her sense of injury. When, on arriving
at Florence, she saw the place Rowland had brought them to in their
trouble, she had given him a look and said a few words to him that
had seemed not only a remission of guilt but a positive reward.
This happened in the court of the villa--the large gray quadrangle,
overstretched, from edge to edge of the red-tiled roof, by the soft
Italian sky. Mary had felt on the spot the sovereign charm of the
place; it was reflected in her deeply intelligent glance, and Rowland
immediately accused himself of not having done the villa justice. Miss
Garland took a mighty fancy to Florence, and used to look down wistfully
at the towered city from the windows and garden. Roderick having now no
pretext for not being her cicerone, Rowland was no longer at liberty, as
he had been in Rome, to propose frequent excursions to her. Roderick's
own invitations, however, were not frequent, and Rowland more than once
ventured to introduce her to a gallery or a church. These expeditions
were not so blis